AWS Community GameDay

AWS Community GameDay Europe takes place on March 17th, 2026, simultaneously across 50+ European cities. Same challenges. Same clock. One pan-European leaderboard. It's organized not by AWS corporate, but by the AWS User Groups that run meetups in your city, which means it has a completely different energy than a polished conference session.

## Before you walk in, a few things worth knowing

• You don't need an AWS account. A sandboxed environment is provided on the day. You show up, you get credentials, you start building.
• You DO need a laptop. Charged. With your preferred browser and ideally the AWS CLI installed. That's the full tech checklist.

For preparation, the most useful investment of your time is not reading documentation. It's getting comfortable navigating the AWS console under pressure. Spin up a few services you haven't used before. Break something intentionally and fix it. The muscle memory matters more than theoretical knowledge.
If you want to be purposeful about it, brush up on these areas that tend to show up across GameDay scenarios:

• IAM and permissions : misconfigured roles are a classic challenge vector
• CloudWatch and logging : knowing where to look when something is wrong is half the battle
• Lambda, API Gateway, and serverless basics useful for cloud-native challenge tracks
• Amazon Bedrock and basic LLM integration : relevant to AI challenge scenarios
• VPC networking fundamentals , security groups, NACLs, routing

You don't need to master all of these. Even one area of depth on your team covers ground.

## 🦄 During: The Event Itself

Doors open at 18:30, teams form by 18:45, the stream starts at 19:00 and the game starts at 19:30 RO time sharp, simultaneously, across every city in Europe.
There's a live stream connecting all locations. A leaderboard. And a shared atmosphere of controlled chaos that's hard to describe until you've been in it.
The challenges drop you into a live AWS environment that's broken in interesting ways. Maybe a service is misconfigured. Maybe there's a security gap you need to find and close. Maybe an architecture is failing under load and your team needs to diagnose and fix it.
Points are awarded as you solve each challenge. Teams work through as many as they can before time runs out.

A few dynamics to know !

• Divide the work early : The teams that do well tend to split into parallel tracks quickly, one person investigates the environment, another reads the challenge documentation, another starts making changes. Sitting together and taking turns doesn't scale.
• Read the challenge text carefully : The instructions often contain hints. Rushing straight to the console and clicking around randomly costs time.
• Ask for help without guilt : There are organizers and AWS community members in the room whose job on the night is to unblock you, not to judge you. Use them.
• Don't spiral on one challenge : If you've been stuck for 20 minutes, note what you've tried and move on. More points exist elsewhere.

The leaderboard is visible throughout the event. It's competitive but not cutthroat -- the room tends to have a collaborative energy despite the competition. People help each other between challenges. That's the community part.

## 🏆After: What You Take Home

The formal event ends after roughly two hours. There's a closing ceremony, results are announced, and the live stream wraps up across all cities.
What stays with you is harder to quantify. Sure, you'll have touched AWS services you'd never have explored on your own. You'll have debugged under real pressure, which builds a kind of confidence no tutorial can give you.
But honestly? That's not the part people remember most.
For me it's the moment your teammate shouts "I found it!" and the whole table erupts. It's high-fiving a stranger you met 90 minutes ago. It's the feeling of solving something together that none of you could have cracked alone. You'll walk out with new connections that started under pressure and those tend to stick. Some of the strongest friendships in this community were born at a GameDay.

Prizes: Designed for teams of 4
1st place global winners will get: 1000$ AWS Credits, 4 Exam Vouchers, unique AWS Community hoodie (limited edition only in EMEA), 4 GameDay Trophies and customized medals/stickers
2nd and 3rd teams as global winners, will get a unique AWS Community Hoodie and customized medals. AWS credits for each team member: 2nd place 100$ and 3rd - 50$.

Prizes

• 1st place global winners will get: 1000$ AWS Credits, 4 Exam Vouchers, unique AWS Community hoodie (limited edition only in EMEA), 4 GameDay Trophies and customized medals/stickers
• 2nd and 3rd teams as global winners, will get a unique AWS Community Hoodie and customized medals. AWS credits for each team member: 2nd place 100$ and 3rd - 50$.
• 1st place local winners will get: free tickets to AWS Community Day Romania for 23-24th of April (aws-community.ro)

PS. because the number of attendees is huge from all over Europe and there's a massive logistical effort in place, registrations will close on the 10th of March so we have time for preparations.